Weapons and Warfare

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1817-1860: KINGDOM OF THE TWO

SICILIES I
Posted on July 27, 2020
The general restoration of Europe’s monarchies that followed Napoleon’s defeat at
Waterloo was con rmed by the Congress of Vienna (1815), and the exiled king of
Sardinia was not forgotten. He recovered his lost lands, returned to Turin, and
promptly attempted the restoration of the status quo ante. Yet post-Napoleonic
Europe was very di erent from pre-revolutionary Europe. Many of the ideas
spawned and exported by the French Revolution continued to circulate, posing a
near-ubiquitous challenge to the natural conservatism of the restored monarchs.
The ideas of ‘the nation’, endowed with a life of its own, and of the inborn right of
its inhabitants to liberty, equality and social fraternity, were particularly strong,
beginning to undermine the post-Napoleonic order as soon as it was established.
Three parts of Europe where ‘the nation’ felt most excluded from politics were
specially susceptible; and popular demands grew for the creation of nation-states
on the French model. Poland, which had been carved up by three neighbouring
empires, was to strive in vain throughout the nineteenth century to win back its
independence; but Germany and Italy were to succeed where Poland failed.
Germany was divided by the intense rivalry of Protestant Prussia and Catholic
Austria; advocates of the German national movement, the Vormärz (‘pre-March’),
could at rst see no easy way to do so. Italy’s divisions were still more marked. The
north was dominated by the Austrian Empire, which held onto both Venice and
Milan; the centre was run by a gaggle of reactionary monarchs, including the
Roman ponti in his Papal States; and the south remained in the grip of the
Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In face of the restored hereditary rulers, the
advocates of the Italian national movement, the Risorgimento or ‘Resurgence’, did
not possess a common strategy.

For Italian nationalism encompassed several competing interests. One wing placed
the emphasis on cultural objectives, notably on education, the promotion of a
single, standardized Italian language, and the promotion of national
consciousness. The central gure in this was the Milanese writer, Alessandro
Manzoni (1785–1873), author of the rst novel written in standard Italian, I
promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827). Another wing was dedicated to political
radicalism. Here the central role was played by the secret and revolutionary
Society of the Coalburners, the Carbonari, whose activities were formally banned;
one of its members, a Sicilian soldier called Guglielmo Pepe (1783– 1855), launched
the rst of many abortive risings in Calabria in 1820. There was even a tradition of
support for the Risorgimento by ruling monarchs; Napoleon’s stepson and viceroy
in Italy, Eugène de Beauharnais, had set the example, which was followed by the
emperor’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, when King of Naples. It seemed to
create the perceived need for a political patron of established authority, who could
curb the hotheads while giving heart to the moderates and negotiating with the
powers.

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was widely regarded, in Italy as in the rest of
Europe, as a place of sloth and squalor, of grandeur and poverty, a place where
landless labourers kept themselves just alive by scratching the parched soil of
distant noblemen, where street urchins in the city picked the pockets of wealthy
tourists and bands of brigands roamed with impunity in the hills outside, a land
exploited and oppressed by an indolent monarchy, a frivolous aristocracy and a
swarm of grasping clergy.

This picture was inherited and preserved by generations of historians until

recently the stereotype was re-examined. Then it transpired that the kingdom was
not just a land of latifondi, of vast desiccated estates in the interior that contained
little except scrub for goats and some thin soil for wheat. Naples may not have had
the irrigation or the natural advantages of Lombardy, but it was not an entirely
backward place; wheat yields there were higher than in the Papal States. As for the
latifondisti, it emerged that they were not all absentee landlords frittering away
the produce of their workers by living in luxury in the capital. The latifondo was
part feudal and part capitalist, part social structure and part business enterprise.
Owners used their lands to feed themselves and the people who lived there, but
they o en grew food for foreign markets as well. The exported produce of the
Barracco family, latifondisti from Calabria, included liquorice, olive oil, ne wool
and cacciacavallo cheese.

The state of industry in Naples has been similarly disparaged: travel accounts of
the period leave the impression that the inhabitants had never heard of the
spinning jenny or the steam engine. Yet a modernized textile industry, aided by a
sensible tari policy, existed in the Apennine foothills in the early nineteenth
century; not much later, an engineering industry was established around the
capital. Naples in fact enjoyed a number of industrial ‘ rsts’. It possessed the
largest shipyards in Italy, it launched the rst peninsular steamboat (1818) and it
enjoyed the largest merchant marine in the Mediterranean; it also built the rst
iron suspension bridge in Italy, constructed the rst Italian railway and was among
the rst Italian cities to use gas for street lighting. Admittedly, not all these
achievements were as impressive as they sound. Naples may have built the rst
railway, but it was a short one, and its construction did not lead to a rapid
expansion of the network. Most of the other states soon caught up and overtook it:
by 1860, when the whole of southern Italy had only 125 miles of track, Lombardy
had 360 and Piedmont, a er a slow start, possessed over 500.

A glance at its economic statistics reveals how separate Naples as a trading partner
was from the rest of Italy. In 1855 85 per cent of its exports were sent to Britain,
France and Austria, while only 3 per cent crossed the border into the Papal States;
Neapolitan trade with Britain was three times greater than that with all the other
Italian states added together. Feelings of separateness were not con ned to
commerce; Naples possessed its own remarkable legal system, widely regarded as
superior to any other in the peninsula. Outsiders noticed that the place was
di erent, a distinct, cosmopolitan entity, a kingdom (with or without Sicily) with
an ancient history and borders which, almost uniquely in Italy, were not subjected
to rearrangement a er every war. Moreover, Naples itself was still by far the
largest city in Italy – indeed the third-largest in Europe a er London and Paris –
and had been a capital since Charles of Anjou had established himself there 600
years earlier. It was the only Italian city, thought Stendhal, that had ‘the true
makings of a capital’; the rest were ‘glori ed provincial towns like Lyon’. Before
1860 hardly anyone contemplated the idea that the kingdom might be destroyed
and its territory annexed by an all-Italian state; and little in the subsequent history
of that state indicates that the Neapolitans would have been unhappier if they had
been le to govern themselves.

In their propaganda Italian patriots of the nineteenth century identi ed the

Neapolitan Bourbons as the chief home-grown tyrants and Austrian Habsburgs as
their foreign equivalents. Yet even they were unable to convince themselves that
the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was an oppressive state. It was governed by
Ferdinand III, son of the great Peter Leopold and brother of the Austrian emperor
whose armies had lost four wars against Napoleon and whose daughter had been
sacri ced to the French emperor’s desire to beget an heir. Ferdinand’s return to
Florence in 1814 did not lead to a persecution of bonapartists or to the abolition of
reforms. As in the eighteenth century, Tuscany was a tolerant and civilized place
that preferred Jews to Jesuits and welcomed exiles from Piedmont and from other
states. Tari s were low, censorship was feeble, and the armed forces were almost
non-existent, though in an emergency the state could call for Austrian troops.
Ferdinand was succeeded in 1824 by his son Leopold II, another benevolent ruler
until the revolutions of 1848 converted him – along with Pope Pius IX and the
King of Naples – to conservatism. In the early part of his reign he reduced taxes,
carried out liberal reforms, encouraged science and returned to that perennially
elusive project of Tuscan rulers, the draining of the Maremma marshlands on the
Tyrrhenian coast.

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